Making the move from GCSE to Alevel in Media Studies

 Welcome to the site for making the transition from GCSE to Alevel Media Studies. 

You are now a photographer, an editor, a journalist, an academic, a creative- these are the roles required to succeed at Media Studies, take this long summer to develop these skills.

There are lots of links on this so click on words with different colour font to follow and explore a little more. If you follow this blog you will get a notification of when I post more content. I will post reading and watching links on here every few days but don't want to bombard you with everything at once.

So what will be different?

Well to start with you will have 9 hours of contact time a fortnight rather than the 5 you are used to at GCSE. So this means lots more time to really go in depth into the topics- there are actually less texts than at GCSE! This means there are loads of opportunities for reading around the subject and to develop your practical skills. You can get more involved in the BBC School News report. Media Captains are busy- you have to earn the badge! They run the junior film club but they also take a key role in documenting school productions and activities and are often called on to photograph and film in and around school. They also assist at Open House and can help with coursework and revision and of course they are in charge of decorating the media theorist Christmas tree!


We study the OCR course link here

There are three aspects to the qualification. 
Two exams with the themes of Media Messages and Evolving Media and one non examined assessment (NEA/coursework), this is worth 30%. 
The research for NEA is started at the end of Year 12 and completed by the Christmas of Year 13. 


The biggest topics are the UK newspaper industry (in print and online)for Media Messages and Television Drama for Evolving Media. We focus on Stranger Things and Deutschland 83 in our study for this. 


These topics will definitely come up and we can prepare very thoroughly for these. They will have some questions that expect you to apply a named theory.

There are several other topics that we study in similar ways but are worth far less in terms of marks and may or may not come up. 

Media Messages 
Print advertising
The Big Issue magazine

Music Videos (we look at Radiohead's Burn the Witch and Lil Nas X). 

The clue for the focus on these texts is in the unit title- 'media messages', we look at how the messages of these products is created and consumed- so for instance, the techniques of the advertising industry, how The Big Issue reflects society and how artists and bands are represented in their promotional material. 

for Evolving Media 
Again the clue is in the title, we look at how these industries have evolved over time and how digital technology has affected them. So for instance for the biggest unit, TV drama we look at how video on demand services with massive budgets like Netflix have influenced the TV industry and how binge watching multiple episodes is a way of audience consumption. 

The smaller units explore the following;
The Jungle Book 1967 and 2016- here we look at how Disney have evolved in their film making, they have gone from a personality (Walt Disney) dominated company to a global conglomerate that constantly innovates and expands- (Disney +, Vault, live action remakes etc). 
We study how radio has had to evolve in the digital age and in particular how younger audiences don't tend to engage with radio as much. To do this effectively we focus on the Radio 1 breakfast show- it was particularly interesting a couple of years ago in terms of evolution when Greg James replaced Nick Grimshaw as the the presenter half way through the course- but this is of course the exciting and interesting aspect of the media- the fact that it is always evolving and changing and why it is such a vibrant subject to study. 



The final topic is video games and we focus on Minecraft. This again is a really good choice as they have completely changed the old 'top down' way of how video games used to be produced as it evolved in the bedroom of a software developer- thus reflecting the evolution of the industry. 




You might want to purchase these books to help you get started. 
The OCR endorsed revision book that we refer to almost constantly 


and the Media Theory book by Mark Dixon. There are 18 set theorists that you must know and this book explains the theories in quite an accessible way (although don't be intimidated by it as it does go into more detail than you actually need but that won't do you any harm!). 


To be notified by email when I have added new content simply click on the three horizontal lines top right then add your email address. See images below.